Occasionally an article catches one’s eye that genuinely opens a raft of interesting new thoughts. That happened to the other day when I read this Guardian piece about a new area of Pirate Bay that offers templates for 3D printers to clone figures for Games Workshop’s Warhammer and Lord of the Rings table-top games.

Up until now, media piracy – as opposed to nautical banditry – has been concerned with freeing up access to information. In the 17th Century, with characters such as Henry Hill the Book Pirate (see this excellent short history of book piracy here), this was about giving the poor equal access to textual information by way of cheap editions of books and illicit pamphlets that were uncensored by the church or crown.

In the digital age this pirate spirit of free access to information was made orders of magnitude more easy as so much – words, music, images, videos, programs – was now no more than a package of 1′s and 0′s. That has wreaked havoc with the industries concerned with protecting their products and trying to make money out of them, but up until now the physical world has remained somewhat immune.

Sure, you could always buy a knock-off Rolex if you wanted to, but that still required some manufacturing work – even if it was substandard. That protection from digitised sharing afforded by the physical is now beginning to crumble. As Pirate Bay spokesman Winston Q2038 put it:

One of the things that we really know is that we as a society will always share. Digital communication has made that a lot easier and will continue to do so. We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour.

This is still some way off, as 3D printers are still prohibitively expensive, but it wasn’t that long ago that the same could be said for DVD burners. What we are looking at in the near future is a world where many physical objects will be able to be pirated and copied right in the home. Like the design of that lampshade? Go to Pirate Bay and download the code for it. Lost a Scrabble tile? Just print one off. Found out where Paris Hilton lives? Print off a key to her house. Everyone will have one.

Of course, there will be symbiotic reaction from the physical world too. We will no long have keys – they’ll just not be safe. And true craftsmen will return to materials that will be more difficult to pirate. But others will embrace this world, and deliver extraordinary things to customers… bespoke will become ordinary; there will be no more original.

This dissolution of the physical into the digital has interesting implications for all art and craft… something I blogged about from a different angle way back in 2005 (ouch!):

“A work of video art is simply a video signal on a tape. Early analog video technology is termed ‘lossy’ – meaning that with every successive copy there is a noticable degradation in quality. Analog technologies still had some claim to the construction of an ‘original’ – the photograph had the negative, and the video has the master copy, from which further copies are struck. The negative and master thus have more value than their offspring.

“Digital video formats released by Sony in the 1990′s changed this condition completely, as they allowed for perfect reproduction. Video is now simply a piece of code – a string of ones and zeros that, unlike its analog parent, is wholly duplicable. Enabling the production of infinite clones with no discernable value hierarchy thus renders ‘original’ a meaningless term.”

That ‘perfect reproduction’ may well be heading out of the hard-drive, and onto the (physical) desktop. And, as ever, pirates will be there to chase down those who want to profiteer. Going to be interesting times.

I received a present the other day – a book through the post from an ex-colleague: ‘Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition.’ It’s a fascinating read.

Admittedly, I was a little wary: there’s a long history of ‘actually, they were gay’ books which would have us believe that Jesus, St Paul, Shakespeare and even George Michael (ok, fair enough) were all gay… but this book is not that at all.

As the author points out, it would be tempting to think ‘yes, there was probably homosexual activity on ships, because, like prisoners, they didn’t have any other outlet.’ But this is to entirely miss the point. Pirates had escaped the prison conditions of the naval ships. They were free men. And some of them – not all – but some of them formed intentionally all-male communities.

Why is this important? Firstly, for reasons that are non-purient. I’m just not interested in an ‘exotic’ twist to the piracy thesis. I think it’s important because it shows, again, how pirates emerged to create TAZ spaces in which taboos could be broken. The emergence of these ‘transgressive’ communities began the process of the deadened orthodoxy being challenged and changed. This is the archetype I’ve been working on in the book from an economic, religious and social perspective… but I’m really glad to be able to expand that into sexual politics too.

Challenging material for some, I’m sure. But that’s what this is all about. As the author writes in the introduction:

‘the major portion of the literature has been concerned with piratical deeds than with pirates. Its appeal, one would surmise from the content, is to an audience of small boys, retired naval officers, and other primarily concerned with cannon, cutlass, gore and decks awash with blood… the opportunity to investigate one of the unique groups in human history has been ignored.’

So, yes, if you thought all this pirate stuff was just about eye-patches and children’s parties, think again. What these challenging and marginal communities of (mostly) men did at the turn of the 18th century has an enormous amount to offer us as we seek to challenge the hegemony of white, Christian capitalist, hierarchical and misogynistic power structures that fanned out in Empire building and did damage that we still suffer today.

I’m hoping to have the 1st draft finished in the next couple of months… just taking time.

Not had much time to post – flat out at work preparing for a school inspection, and reading and writing when I can too. All of which ironically brings me to post about the very idea of work… It starts with rather a good story, which I hope you’ll bear with before I try to make my point…

I’m reading The Many-Headed Hydra – Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Life of the Revolutionary Atlantic – which opens with the fascinating story of the Sea Venture, which left England for Virginia in 1609.

The ship was commissioned by the Virginia Company to restock (and effectively save) the fledgling settlement in the Americas. It was part of a fleet of three ships carrying supplies, criminals being sent to work on the plantation, skilled labourers and Virginia Company money-men. The Admiral of the Company was even himself on board. It was thus a micro-society, containing men and women of every class. And it was a new boat whose timbers had not yet sealed.

After 6 weeks at sea the fleet hit a storm, and the Sea Venture was separated from the others. They battled for three days in a hurricane, and the boat was taking on water so badly that every man, woman and child – regardless of status or position was tasked to bail out constantly to save the ship. Exhausted, they eventually considered themselves lost and, thinking themselves so close to death, cracked open the supplies of rum, deciding that now they had worked together with no regard for class, if they were going to die they might as well die together in the same way in a merry feast.

As they drank, the helmsman spied land and wrecked the ship on Bermuda, whereupon all were saved. Expecting a hostile, haunted isle, they were surprised to find it a virtual utopia. Food was plentiful, the environment beautiful… they could all survive with very little effort.

A long way from home or rescue, most of them set about making a new life for themselves – a life far better than they had ever known. They needed do little work, and once shelters were made they enjoyed themselves and considered themselves new Adams and Eves.

But a small number of them – those who had positions of power within the Virginia Company – were very unhappy about this. They demanded that everyone work to make new ships, and that they should aim to make it on to Jamestown. Of course, the rest disagreed, knowing that as soon as they reached there they would be worked literally to death as slave labourers.

Considering it their divine duty, the Virginia Company officials set about re-establishing class divisions and a culture of hard work, and did so with the establishment of capital punishment: killing those who refused to tow the line.

Thus, eventually, the vast majority ended up back on ships and heading for Jamestown, which they found starving and ravaged. Most died there.

The story is a famous one, and even at the time created quite a stir. Shakespeare almost certainly based The Tempest on it, and many philosophers were troubled by the problems it created: viz, are human beings created for work or leisure?

As I’m so under the cosh at the moment with my own work, it’s something I’m thinking a lot about. Why am I working so hard? Certainly not all of it is for personal satisfaction, and far too much is about paying the bills. It’s a vicious circle of needing to work to make enough money to sustain the lifestyle I’m told I need if only I’d work a bit harder…

And all the while there are those who do so little, and make so much. Step up Carlos Tevez…

The nagging question is this: to what extent are we still suffering this Protestant Capitalist work ethic? The movement of people off the land and into the factories was certainly driven in part by hard-core protestantism…

Early settlers in the Americas were shocked by how little the Native Americans did – and yet how well fed they remained. We just seem so tied into this crazy system of labour, and it’s killing us all, and the planet, and I don’t really see much being modelled elsewhere. Most of the church seems to preach a gospel of labour. ‘They chose their preachers like they chose their horses,’ as RS Thomas wrote, ‘for their hard work.‘

We may have patched up their homes a bit, but we still demand so much from the working classes. And still punish hard those who step out of line and demand an alternative life…

The work on piracy continues apace. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is the pirate emblem ‘The Jolly Roger.’ This skull and crossed bones, or swords, was hoisted by pirates as they approached vessels they were about to attack, as a sort of early warning / threat system. Crews who had turned mutinously on their captains would also hastily stitch together a Jolly Roger and raise it as a sign that they had ‘gone pirate.’ But what does this flag actually mean?

The skull and crossed bones was the symbol that was recorded in the ship’s log if a member of the crew died. As life aboard these ocean-going ships was horribly tough, this was not an uncommon occurrence. Traditionally then, the raising of the Jolly Roger has been taken as a way of driving fear into those the pirates were attacking – a fear that came from the message ‘we are going to kill you.’ In other words, pirates were warning those they attacked that they would bring death upon any who resisted.

But I believe there’s another way of looking at this flag. Pirates were, as the title of Marcus Rediker’s excellent book goes, Villains of All Nations. Almost all of them had turned pirate having been on naval or merchant vessels and rebelled. The fact that they did was unsurprising, as conditions were shockingly bad:

Sailors suffered cramped claustrophobic quarters, “food” that was often as rotten as it was meager, and more. They experienced as a matter of course devastating disease, disabling accidents, shipwreck and premature death. They faced discipline from their officers  that was brutal at best and often murderous. They got small reward for their death-defying labours, for wages were low and fraud in payment frequent. – Villains of All Nations p 43

They were “caught in a machine from which there was no escape, bar desertion, incapacitation, or death.” Sailors in the Royal Navies were the scum of the earth. To the officers who abused them – and often killed them – sailors were nothing.

So the approach of a pirate vessel flying the Jolly Roger was terrifying in another more radical way too. The skull and crossed bones does not mean ‘we are bringing you death’; rather it announces ‘we are the dead.’ We, the shat-on, the abused, the flogged, the ones you treated as less than human, have escaped your power, have slipped away from the identity you foisted onto us. We, the ones who you took for dead, are returning as the dead – and thus totally free of all fear, totally free of all human labels or classifications or ranks.

This is far more terrifying. The fear of death is only surpassed by one thing: the fear that those you have killed off, live on and will return to haunt you. This is what pirates did as they boarded other vessels. The Quartermaster would assemble the seamen of the captured vessel and ask among them ‘who will serve under the death’s head and black colours?’ Who, in other words, will be prepared to become as dead to the world of the Empire, of the King and Queen, of England and its rich merchants and iron-clad class system, and live on as pirate?

It’s here that we see an interesting parallel with Christianity emerging. Christians have traditionally worn crosses – a symbol of death. This isn’t worn to inspire fear (one hopes) – which is odd, given that the wearer is carrying around a symbol of torture. Rather, it is worn to signify personal death: the wearer has rejected all the identities that the world shoves upon us: Jew, Greek, Slave, Free, Male, Female – and has thus become terrifyingly free, unfettered by the norms which are meant to keep people in their place.

Pirates – and Christians – thus gather under an emblem of death not in order to inspire fear of death, or to create anarchy, but as a sign that they have died to the world, to the identities that the world pushed onto them. We might say that pirates did not raise the Jolly Roger as a symbol of violence, but rather as a declaration that no more violence could be done to them. They were dead, and yet lived still – and thus the Empire should tremble in fear, for the powerless slaves it had thought subsumed and controlled, were free and living without fear of the law.

I’ve been away for a couple of days, so haven’t posted again on the aftermath of the night of looting that gripped various locations in London, and then spread to other cities in the UK. But in the mean time I’ve faced some criticism for my previous post for a) appearing to back away from the piracy ideas I’ve been explaining that I’m working on and b) for not being prepared to admit that these ‘riots’ are a genuine political act on the part of London’s poor.

I want to deal with the second part first. Some observers have wanted to put forward a thesis that these riots represent a rising up of a British underclass against a dominant culture that has grown in them material desires, while refusing to give them fair access to wealth to fulfil these desires. Actually, I do believe that a riot of this sort is possible in London, it’s just that I don’t accept that this was it. Why? Because a careful examination of the people involved in the disturbances and the places in which they occurred just doesn’t stack up to allow that. Yes, I’d love it to be really simple and to follow some historical precedent, or some careful theory about class violence, and yes, it is possible that there were pockets of this occurring, but the vast majority of people involved in these disturbances were not there to engage in political violence. As I’ve said before, they were there for the spectacle.

Now, it may be that the spectacle is itself something we need to analyse and think about, and that a society which has a large number of potentially bored and uninspired young people may be a tinderbox for this kind of looting, but if so we have to reject the idea that this is the poor of London rising up. It isn’t.

The Guardian have posted a map of London, coloured by degree of deprivation, and over-layed the areas of disturbance – asking the question if there is correlation between the two. It would be tempting to say that there is a strong correlation, but this is highly problematic, because we know that over 70% of those arrested were arrested in a different postcode from where they lived. People travelled to these places. The map also gives a false impression because it doesn’t grade the severity of incident in each place. Remember: some of the major centres of disturbance were Clapham Junction, Ealing Broadway, Croydon – none of which could be described as deprived areas.

Yes, poverty and alienation was and is a factor, but, as I said in the last post, it’s facile to suggest that this was a riotous uprising of the poor. It doesn’t add up.

Secondly, and connectedly, none of this has made me reconsider the work on piracy that I have been doing. If this were a riot with the poor rising up against a system that was blocking their access to the economic freedoms that others enjoy, I’d stand up and say that this could be interpreted as an act of orthodox piracy and understood in that context. But this isn’t that riot.  Of course, I am working with what we might call the ‘ideal pirate’ and constructing things around that – and no act will probably be seen as this ‘ideal’ act of piracy, except what we see in the crucifixion, but that’s for another day!

I’m currently reading Marcus Rediker’s excellent book Villains of all Nations – Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age, in which he looks closely at why pirates emerged at that particular time. Much of his socio-economic analysis is highly relevant for today, but none of it suggests that what we saw in London could be raised from the level of common theft to a true act of piracy.

One (flawed) piece that may be worth reading is David Goodhart’s in Prospect:

A rapper called JaJa, interviewed by Sky TV, said if he was younger he would have been out with the kids. He then admitted that most of them were doing it for fun, to feel powerful, “for 15 minutes of fame.” The actual rioters I saw interviewed on television did complain about the Duggan case, but the real complaint seemed to be the police’s power to stop them committing crime.

I dislike Goodhart’s lazy assumption about the racial make-up of the rioters, but some of his analysis is correct. It’s too easy to label this as ‘the poor rioting against the rich.’ I don’t believe it will serve London well to pursue this idea as a way of getting to the root of what is a far more complex problem.

Thought it would be good to catch people up a little on what I’ve been working on the last couple of weeks. As you’ll know if you’ve read here for any time, one of my areas of interest is around pirates and piracy. I posted a series entitled ‘A Plea for Christian Piracy’ some time ago which you can get to here (start at first post, obviously). That prompted quite a bit of discussion on various sites, which I rounded up into some links here.

Having taken the discussion about pirates a little further in the publication of Other (US version here) I felt as though I had probably done enough. However, things never quite work out that way, and a series of insights I’ve had recently a) through some psychotherapy and b) in conversations with Pete and others have led me to want to write a more comprehensive work on the place of pirates within our culture.

The basic thesis will be this: pirates emerge wherever cultures have become ‘blocked.’ This applies to the traditional idea of sea-faring pirates, who, as I’ve explored a little in Other, arose as a rebellion against the merchants and princes who enslaved them. They were victims of a blocked economic order, and their rebellion was an essential act of unblocking which eventually gave rise to a more equitable system.

Moreover, I’ll want to argue that this piratical act was part of the founding principle of America – called by some ‘the first pirate nation – and that this principle has been sadly lost. By exploring the phenomenal rise in media piracy I’ll examine how this has again occurred because of a blockage, and that tighter and tighter copyright laws and digital rights will do nothing to solve the problem. Indeed, if America is to regain something about the dream it seems to have lost, a return to piracy should be welcomed.

Finally though, my interest is in why pirates have remained so fascinating for children and parents alike. And, using some stuff from Star Wars and The Godfather, as well as some ‘dark inversions’ of parables, what the last part of the book will explore is the way that pirates gift us a way of unblocking the often difficult move from childhood to adulthood, and, by linking this to an atheistic view of the Christ event, we can see the pirate figure of Christ performing a radical act of theological unblocking too.

I currently don’t have a publisher for this as yet, but am talking to people about what I might do with it… which could end up a work of piracy in itself. But if you’re interested and would like to see it completed, then bombard me with encouragement and I’ll get off my ass to finish it. I mean, it’s only going to save the US from economic doldrums and the Western Church from certain death Can I get an ARRRRRR from you, you lubbers?!

Just got back from a couple of weeks holiday where I took a proper break from posting. Space to think about other stuff really, and ‘Devon’ and ‘Wireless Network’ are not immediately at home in the same sentence yet.

This weekend I’ll be off to Greenbelt, where I’m doing two talks expanding on some of the themes in Other.

The first talk is called ‘One and Other‘ and is at 7:3opm on Friday in Talks 2 (Hebron)

From noisy neighbours to nervous political coalitions, fears about immigration, racism, fundamentalism and international terrorism – our fear of engaging ‘the other’ is at the heart of so many of our problems. What can Jesus’ commandment to love God and love our neighbour mean in an increasingly pluralist and fluid world of online friendship and offline anxiety?

The second, ‘Pirates of the Charism‘ (sorry – couldn’t resist the pun!) is on Saturday at 7pm in Talks 4 (Galilee)

Admitting that there are strangenesses in myself, in God and in other people, how can we practically work out better ways of becoming, as one theologian put it, ‘the kinds of selves who live in harmony with others’? Among others, pirates – with their ‘short and merry lives’ – may hold some clues to better engaging ‘the other.’

It’s in this second talk that I’m hoping to drill down further into the TAZ / Christian Piracy concept that lots of people have picked up on in the book and found contentious. So there’ll hopefully be good chance for debate on that. Be great to see people, so do come and say hello.

Apart from that, I’m working on the next mini-series of Apple evenings, which are going to be on Sept 15th, October 13th and November 17th. Follow appleTMP on Twitter for updates, or check the Apple blog.

Finally, some places I’ve turned up… Good to see Jonny’s new book (which I won’t call romantic tosh in public JOOKING) on Curating Worship, which has a long dialogue between him, me and Nick Hughes about Vaux and our take on curation. He’s launching it in London and offering free booze, so I’ll be there for that! I’ve also got a piece in Third Ways’ ‘Futures’ issue, and Becky Garrison’s book Jesus Died for This is out too, which has some stuff from me in it too. Oh, and if you didn’t catch me on William Crawley’s Sunday Sequence a couple of weeks back, it’s a great show!

Firstly, the series of posts I did on ‘A Plea for Christian Piracy’ can be found here. Start at Pirates [1] and work on…

Secondly, some a round up of some of the other posts (from Pete Rollins, Richard Sudworth etc.) that that generated can be found here… Plus a little thought on the crucifix and the skull and crossed bones here.

Finally, here’s a longer article I wrote – a version of which appeared in Third Way magazine – In Defence of Pirates, which I hope will be helpful. All of this is thinking I’ve done which is condensed into the section on piracy in ‘Other’, which I hope people will go read and respond to too… I’m convinced that the pirate/heretic/cultural transfer and TAZ idea is one that is rich for our times:

This, then, is the lesson that pirates hold for us as people of faith. Was not the incarnation the penetration of our culture, a rupture that we experienced as heresy, a challenge to our economics and ethics that we resisted and fought back? Was not Jesus arrested and tortured and strung up for all to see like those 17th Century lovers of liberty, chained to gillets by the Thames? Did he not also demand that ‘no Man has the Power of the Liberty of another; and while those who profess a more enlightened Knowledge of the Deity […] prov’d that their Religion was no more than a Grimace’?

Financially, spiritually, culturally, theologically… the time for some good piracy is upon us. Avast, ye lubbers…

For those (few, I know) who may have followed here but not elsewhere, there has been quite a lot of reaction to the posts on piracy, mostly ignited by Richard Sudworth’s repost to my posts. I thought it’d be useful to do some aggregation:

Richard’s original repost

Pete Rollins’ counter to Richard

Richard’s counter to Pete

Pete’s return

Jonny Baker’s middle-way reflection

Maggi Dawn’s thoughts [ 1 ] [ 2 ]

Mark Berry’s thoughts

Simon Cross’ thoughts

Mike Radcliffe’s thoughts

Bill Kinnon’s thoughts on Jonny and Richard’s thoughts

Tractor Girl’s thoughts

Backburner’s thoughts on piracy and the economics of information

Ben Edson’s thoughts

What’s interesting of course is plotting the different degrees of separation from the original posts of the different comments. Not a value-judgement, simply an observation about our modern reading habits: we so rarely bother to read the full texts of that which we are commenting on.

Not sure I’ll be waging in any further into the debate, as 7 posts is quite enough on the subject for a while at least! Given the level of response though, suffice to say the seams that Pete and I and others are mining are either really right, or really wrong. I’ll let you decide.

We began this series with a question – why is it that we are happy to allow our children to go to pirate parties, and involve themselves in all sorts of pirate-related nonsense, when these are basically no more than violent thieves? We don’t put on GBH or Aggravated Robbery parties.

We have seen since that pirates function as shadows of ‘blocked’ societies: that they emerge from the detritus of capitalism or imperial Christianity. Initially seen as heretics, their activities actually hold within them the key for unblocking that society, and thus for retentive orthodoxy to be reinvigorated and liberated – to emerge from the shadows.

So, to complete the circle: why is it that children are fascinated by pirates – and, connectedly, why are we as parents so happy for them to engage in piracy? I believe it is because every parent knows that one day their child will have to make their own way. Every parent knows that for a child to individuate they must, in some faithful way, rebel and commit heresy. Pirates offer our children a taste of this journey, and thus carry with them a hope that heresy will change both parent and child, and that liberty will result.

Perhaps the best example of this process is in the story of Peter Pan. Ostensibly about ‘the boy who never grew up,’ it is really about Wendy, ‘the girl who realised that she had to grow up.’ Peter Pan comes to Wendy and her siblings, and they fly off away from home into the night. On arriving at Pan’s home, Wendy immediately takes on the role of mother figure.

But Peter Pan is really just a vehicle, a way of getting Wendy into a situation in which she realises the role that she has to grow into. And who is it who really disturbs the system and forces her to see that she must return to London and stop being a child? Captain Hook and his pirates. Moreover, it is a crocodile with a ticking clock in its tummy – what more obvious symbol could Barrie have come up with for her bodyclock? – that drives the action forward too.

Wendy does return to London, but Pan and the ‘lost’ boys will not stay with her and become adults. In a later edition to the play, Barrie inserted an epilogue that showed that Pan came back to take Wendy’s daughter away, and had also taken her mother too. The cycle will go on for ever: children must leave their parents, commit the heresy of abandoning them, and go with Pan to be taken by pirates… But in this heresy they begin to see that they too must return home and become the new orthodoxy. It is the cycle of life, and without pirates, it would be neutered.

So, finally, where does that leave us with our modern-day pirates? What does that suggest about our attitudes towards Somali pirates or the DVD rippers? Put simply, it suggests that we should reflect on our own society that has spawned them, and try to see where it is we are ‘blocked.’ For their heresies are simply natural reactions, designed to challenge our dying orthodoxy, and reinvigorate it with new life. Where there are pirates, there are shadows to be examined.

Thanks for travelling.